Campaigns of Waterloo (1815) & Marlborough.
On the other hand, the Allies did not care at first to take the initiative, though they were enormously superior in number. Each had his own views as to what their great antagonist would do. Wellington had, throughout, made up his mind that the emperor would attack his right and sever his communications with the sea, although such a course would force the concentration of the two possibly undefeated armies. So determined was he that this view was correct, that even on the supreme day of Waterloo he had detached at Halle some 10,000 men to guard the flank that was not even threatened. In his first and last meeting with Napoleon he did not grasp his adversary’s skill. He was planning an invasion of France at the moment the French tricolors were crossing the frontier. On the other hand, Blucher, with the difficult country of the Ardennes between his line of communication and the enemy, was necessarily not so anxious for his outer flank, and was quite prepared to fight opposite Charleroi.
THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON
With Napoleon, decision and execution followed rapidly one on the other. The army was quickly and secretly concentrated, and after issuing an address appealing to past glories, in which direct reference is made to the English “prison ships,”[44] it crossed the Sambre on the 15th June, and the outposts became engaged; but when night fell, only a portion of the French army were on the north bank of the stream. The staff work had been bad, and an important order was not received in time, because it was sent by one orderly instead of in duplicate by two, and he had a bad tumble. Then began the series of delays which were among the many causes that led later to the emperor’s defeat at Waterloo.
The left wing under Ney was so long in closing up to Quatre Bras, that the British troops at the end of the day outnumbered their opponents, and D’Erlon’s corps had been swinging pendulum-like between the two battlefields of Ligny and Quatre Bras, to be useful at neither. Turning to the Allied side, Blucher had readily gauged the French plan, if Wellington had not. The night sky, reddened with the glare of many fires on the night of the 14th June, had warned the advanced corps of Ziethen that a large force lay in front of him, the details of which were told him by the deserter Bourmont, who was received with scant courtesy by the honest old Prussian. “It is all one,” he said in German, when he noticed the white cockade of the Bourbons in the general’s hat, “what a man sticks in his hat, a scoundrel remains a scoundrel”; and so, dismissing him, he carried out the concentration of his army towards Ligny. Here, on the morning of the 16th, the French right wing, under Napoleon’s personal leadership, forced back the Prussians, and after a severe conflict, which lasted till night, drove them back, he thought in the direction of Liège, practically in the direction of Wavre. But when defeated, Blucher’s “noble daring” in deciding on falling back on Wavre rather than Liège, “at once snatched from Napoleon the hoped-for fruits of his victory, and the danger Ligny had for a few hours averted was left impending over him.”
On the other flank, there is much to be said. There seems little doubt that false reports from France had lulled Wellington into a feeling of security for which, as results proved, there was little basis; and to this may be added the somewhat futile demonstrations against his right front.
Even when the passage of the Sambre by the French army was actually known, on the afternoon of the 15th, still he delayed his decision, and merely orders for the concentration of his widely-spread units were issued. When at night the news was confirmed, the general tenor of the orders pointed rather to a concentration at Nivelle than on the Charleroi road; yet he knew by then that imposing masses of hostile troops were north of that place. Had Ney been vigorous and rapid, nothing could have prevented the separation of the Allied armies.
That this was not so, was due to the independent initiative of a Dutch-Belgian general, Perponcher, who assembled his command at Quatre Bras, without orders, only a mile or two from the French bivouac, on the night of the 15th June. Then came the celebrated ball when—